The Memoto is a “lifelogging camera” designed to capture and then re-stream everything that happens to you. Does this mean the end of memory as we know it?

The cyborgian future that awaits us is full of enhancements to the human form that we never dreamed possible–including infants on wheels, brain wave-operated helicopters, and wire-infused animal tissues. Many of these new technologies straddle the boundary between cool and creepy, including the latest cyborgian accessory to knock its Kickstarter campaign out of the water: an accessory that promises the power of a comprehensive visual memory to anyone who asks for it.

advertisement

Memoto is a new “lifelogging camera” that condenses the power of a 5-megapixel camera with an extra-long battery into a miniature clip-on device that’s always on. Its creators suggest that Memoto wearers will never again forget the small moments that make up daily life. And if you think it’s odd that people would wear a small camera to (surreptitiously?) film everything that’s going on around them, the 2,000-plus Kickstarter backers who have showered Memoto’s founder with nearly half a million dollars in two weeks would beg to differ.

The Swedish team of creators has spent a year developing the camera and apps to go along with it, calling the device “small enough to never be in the way and smart enough to capture life as we live it.” What makes it smart is its use of GPS to register the exact location of each photo snapped. On your iPhone or Android device, an app will organize the images into a timeline for easy editing and sorting. And an added feature: the buttonless camera knows to turn on the moment its clipped to your clothing and turns off the moment it’s placed down.

Of course, dealing with this much photographic data could be more trouble than its worth, but according to Memoto’s Kickstarter, the app will facilitate that process by grouping together pictures as distinct moments, which can then be reviewed as a “stop-motion like video.” They write, “the image analysis and organization is made out of the images’ metadata, such as time, place, and light. This enables you to not only browse your life the way you remember it, but to search for specific events of your life.” Memoto plans to charge a monthly fee for storing this massive amount of data (but Kickstarter backers get the data storage for free.)

It’s certainly an exciting concept as far as the future of photography goes: a world in which the physical act of taking a photo is replaced with a constantly watching, endlessly recording, discrete device, absorbing images like a human eye, only to never let them go.

About the author

Zak Stone is a Los Angeles-based writer and a contributing editor of Playboy Digital. His writing has appeared in TheAtlantic.com, NYMag.com, Los Angeles, The Utne Reader, GOOD, and elsewhere.